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Wednesday, 19 February 2014

CHIEF FORCES SUBJECTS TO GREET KING

A chief in
Swaziland has told his subjects they have no rights when it comes to attending
‘traditional’ ceremonies involving the King: they have to go.

The
instruction by Chief Malambule of Mbilaneni that he will force people to
turn out to greet and celebrate King Mswati III confirms suspicions that Swazi
people might not be as keen to support the monarch as his supporters insist.

King Mswati
rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch and there are
several ‘traditional’ cultural ceremonies where people are expected to celebrate
him.

Chief Malambule
was quoted by the Swazi Observer, a newspaper in
effect owned by the King, saying, ‘As long as I am still the ruler here, all of
you are expected to participate in all activities such as the cultural events
of the kingdom and this is a must.’

The
newspaper said the chief ‘who seemed to be seething with anger’ told about 400
of his subjects who attended a mass meeting he had called to address them, ‘that
he expected no one to claim he or she had a right to participate or not to
participate in important national duties’.

Chief
Malambule was angry that so few of his subjects had attended the Incwala
ceremony in December 2013.

Incwala is a
controversial annual ceremony in which the King goes into seclusion. His
supporters call the ceremony a ‘national prayer’, but some Christian leaders
have labelled it ‘un-Godly’ and ‘pagan’.

The Observer quoted him saying, ‘No one
should claim he or she has a right to decide if he or she attends these
ceremonies. I am expecting all the boys to attend ceremonies such as Lusekwane
and Incwala.

‘I found
myself having nowhere to hide during the recent Incwala when I had to identify
a group of tingatja which was expected to accompany me. I found that less than
four of the boys attended and I turned a laughing stock to other chiefs whose
boys came in numbers.’

Chief Malambule
fined each homestead in his chiefdom with boys who did not attend E20, about one
day’s income for seven in ten of Swaziland’s population.

Another of the major ‘traditional’ cultural ceremonies where people are
pressured to attend is the Reed Dance or Umhlanga, which takes place each year,
usually in August or September.

Here
‘maidens’ dance half naked in front of the King. Thousands attend (although the
actual numbers are contested), but there have been reports
in past years of girls being coerced into attending by their chiefs and the
girls’ families can be victimised if they do not go.

Sponsors, keen to gain the King’s approval, have also offered gifts,
such as sneakers, to those who dance before the King.

Musa Hlophe,
a regular columnist for the Times of
Swaziland, one of the few newspapers in the kingdom not owned by King
Mswati, commented after one Reed Dance that many of the girls who attended went
because it was their only chance to get a decent meal.

Traditionally
they lead a band of area elders. They can decide who lives where and some have
been known to banish people from their homes for not obeying rules. Sometimes
chiefs demand tithes from their subjects such as a beast or money.

In November
2013, the
newly-appointed Chief Ndlovula of Motshane threatened to evict nearly 1,000 of
his subjects from grazing land if they did not pay him a E5,000 (US$500) fine, the
equivalent of more than six months income for many.

He said his
subjects had illegally built homes on land put aside for grazing.

Chiefs also
settle disputes such as over land, accusations of witchcraft, and wandering
livestock that harm someone’s crops. Many also settle criminal disputes that
probably should best be left to magistrates.

Chiefs are given stipends by the national treasury, but not salaries, and
community members pay their allegiance to chiefs by weeding and harvesting
their fields, and constructing the traditional mud and thatch huts usually
found at chiefs’ homesteads.

In Swaziland
chiefs do the king’s bidding at a local level. People know not to mess with the
chief because their livelihood depends on his goodwill. In some parts of
Swaziland the chiefs are given the power to decide who gets food that has been
donated by international agencies and then the chiefs quite literally have
power of life and death in such cases with about a third of the population of
Swaziland receiving food aid each year.

Chiefs can
and do take revenge on their subjects who disobey them. There is a catalogue of
cases in Swaziland. For example, Chief Dambuza Lukhele of Ngobelweni in the
Shiselweni region banned his subjects
from ploughing their fields because some of them defied his order to build a
hut for one of his wives.

Nhlonipho
Nkamane Mkhatswa, chief of Lwandle in Manzini, the main
commercial city in Swaziland, reportedly stripped a
woman of her clothing in the middle of a Swazi street in full view of the
public because she was wearing trousers against his orders.